Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday June 23, 2009 @07:06AM
from the big-fish-landed-and-gaffed dept.

Czmyt sends the excellent news that one of the US's most notorious spammers has pleaded guilty and could serve 6 years in jail. "Five individuals pleaded guilty today in federal court in Detroit for their roles in a wide-ranging international stock fraud scheme involving the illegal use of bulk commercial e-mails, or 'spamming'... Alan M. Ralsky, 64, of West Bloomfield, Mich., and Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of West Bloomfield, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. ... Ralsky and Bradley also pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine..."

...involved leaving 10% of him here, sending 50% to the Prince of Nigeria, and sending 40% to the corrupt Nigerian government officials as a bribe. It has worked well for generations - But we'll need your help to complete the transaction...

Alan M. Ralsky, 64, of West Bloomfield, Mich., and Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of West Bloomfield, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. Ralsky and Bradley also pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under the federal sentencing guidelines while Bradley acknowledges that he is facing up to 78 months in prison and a $1 million fine under the federal sentencing guidelines.

John S. Bown, 45, of Fresno, Calif., pleaded guilty... facing up to 63 months in prison and a $75,000 fine under the federal sentencing guidelines

William C. Neil, 46, of Fresno, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the CAN-SPAM Act and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Neil acknowledges he is facing up to 37 months in prison...

James E. Fite, 36, of Culver City, Calif.,... up to two years in prison and a $30,000 fine under the federal sentencing guidelines.

"Greetings friend, this is Homer Simpson, aka, Happy Dude. The courts have ordered me to call everyone, and apologize for my telemarketing scam...I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send $1 to Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!"

Anyone who ever got an unsolicited email from Ralsky gets one shot at him. One for each email. No weapons, no tools, nothing lethal, and no closed fists. Then he goes free.

And then after a few million slaps to the nuts, we all jump up and go "HAHA! Don't you just HATE being misled!" and throw him in prison, take all his money, and give his cellmate (who has anger issues due to being conned in stock scams) a box containing his body weight in Viagra.

Actually, English Common Law is not too different from this. The idea behind "having justice done" was restitution, ie, the idea that the perpetrator has to "restore" the injured person to his "whole" state.

Today, it's the government that brings the charges, and then the injured party gets victimized twice -- once by the criminal, and once again by the government who taxes him to pay for the incarceration of the criminal.

Government justice [youtube.com] works just as well as government-made cars, government-run post off

So, wanna get in on a BRAND NEW BUSINESS as a FEDERAL PRISON PROVIDER COMPANY? It's a great ground level opportunity to build your prison from the ground up! Get all the local, state and federal subsidies you could ever squander! Hire your own team of crack prison guards!

WARNING: Waterboarding may be illegal in some jurisdictions. Your mileage may vary. Check with your local law enforcement agencies. Nah, don't bother, they won't answer, they won't have to, they're LAW ENFORCEMENT.

Did they confiscate his earnings too? He supposedly made $3 million [forbes.com] by spamming. If he's just being fined $1 million and gets to keep the other $2 million, I'd hardly call this effective even with the prison sentence.

So is he's going to a nice minimum security prision for 6 years on the tax payer dime and getting fined a million eh? How much do you want to bet he'll earn more then a million in 6 years in interest on the money he's taken in.

Without turning this into a 50 post thread on the concept of criminal justice I'l summarize thusly:

"Take everything away from a criminal and leave him nothing but the title of criminal; then all you will every have is a criminal."

We learned this in WW1\WW2 as we decimated Germany's ability to function as a nation after WW1 which was the root cause for the Nazi rise to power. We learned that when you put a man in jail then release him into the public with no future, no second chances, no resources, all you d

That's the point for all the people who are complaining about the Hang 'Em, then Burn 'Em posts. The guy did something wrong. Maybe fair punishment for that something is literally a slap on the wrist, or a 1 dollar fine, or something equally trivial. But if you literally slap a person's wrist often enough to finish punishing them for fifty million counts before they die of old age, about a million slaps into it their arm will look like a side of beef and they will go into shock and die. Even a few hundred t

Email filtering company MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain [today.com].

"It's not like there's much else to do," said Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. "Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm... the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That's Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week."

Spam has revitalised the local economy. Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. "I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow."

The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. "You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!" is to become the new town motto.

"I did get a good one the other day," says Busybody. "Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! 'Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry."

I don't get it anymore. Someone shares 24 songs online and she gets a 1.92 M$ fine, and this guy, who annoyed a whole lot of people and got money for that too, only gets a 1 M$ fine? So if you do something for others you are fined more than when you annoy people because you get money for it? Unbelievable. What happened to the Land of the Free?

This guy was my neighbor when I was growing up. It doesn't surprise me that he grew up to be a spam king, he was always looking for a way to 'get rich quick' and had a more than average understanding of computers (and a less than average understanding of just about everything else). I can remember him running some sort of telecommunications software on his Apple II every time I was over at his house playing with his daughter. Now looking back on it, I wonder what he was doing and if it was legal. Then again he gave me hundreds of pirated Apple II games at the time so probably not (although I was one happy 10 year old).

Maybe I'm just a simpleton but shouldn't fines exceed the amount of money a person profits in a scam? Ralsky supposedly made over $4 million in less than 18 months. Not that I'm surprised the same thing happens with corrupt CEO's and their ilk. The idea that someone looses a fraction of their ill gotten gains, spends a couple years in jail then gets to live out the rest of their life in relative comfort with the rest of the fortune they managed to gain through their illegal activities does nothing but ma

... it won't make a damned bit of difference in the overall spamming epidemic. One spammer thrown in jail is like stomping on an ant colony; it might give some immediate satisfaction to those who are of that persuasion, but there are still trillions of ants left doing the same thing.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: spam is an economic problem. If the US wrote 500 new anti-spam laws today, making it illegal to so much as consider sending out spam, it wouldn't matter worth shit. People who are sending out spam today do it because people pay them to do it; and they will find places to send it from so that they can keep making money at it. They all know that the US laws aren't worth anything anywhere outside the US (and their worth inside the US is debatable as well), which is part of why we see so much spam come from other countries.

That is a pie-in-the-sky approach. You cannot possibly "educate" every person with an email address in the world to not reply to spam.

If you can remove the economic incentive of spam, then - and only then - will spam go away. Until then spammers will always make sales for the spamvertised domains, and hence the spammers will always get paid for their work. Which means we will all continue to see more spam.

That is a pie-in-the-sky approach. You cannot possibly "educate" every person with an email address in the world to not reply to spam.

If you can remove the economic incentive of spam, then - and only then - will spam go away. Until then spammers will always make sales for the spamvertised domains, and hence the spammers will always get paid for their work. Which means we will all continue to see more spam.

Now to quote your sig...

Do you really have enough information to support your claim?

Do you?

I've seen some pretty solid evidence that a lot of spamvertised domains don't actually profit from it, but there's no shortage of new customers so the spammers keep making profits without having to worry about retaining customers.

I've seen some pretty solid evidence that a lot of spamvertised domains don't actually profit from it, but there's no shortage of new customers so the spammers keep making profits without having to worry about retaining customers.

I would like to see the evidence you speak of. In support of my claim, I offer The SpamHaus entry of Leo Kuvayev [spamhaus.org]. We see that Mr. Kuvayev (who uses several aliases as well) repeatedly uses spam for the same companies, using the same web pages. The contact info all goes back to the same place for his new customers. Whoever is paying him for his spamming services is buying his services repeatedly.

Yes, spam is damn annoying and the guys deserve imprisonment, and confiscation of every penny they earned through spam. But to compare fraudulent execs favorably to these, is a little overboard. Cheating you out of your money is lesser crime than spam?!?!

Let's see, spammers provide financial incentive to operate botnets that do billions in damage. My mail server rejects over 99% of all incoming mail as spam. The remaining fraction of a percent is about 25% spam. Fail2ban triggers on about 1000 hosts attempting to brute force an SMTP password every single day. If I tail the logs, it's a continuous stream of crap 24/7. I could do without that.

It is a close call. I suppose we just need to make BOTH into permanent porta-potty scrubbers.

Well, to be fair, the execs cheat some of us some of the time, while the spammers cheat all of us all of the time. How? Bandwidth and time, neither of which is free. Just think how much faster ALL of our Internet connections would be if the servers of the world wasn't constantly getting pounded with spam, and if you think you waste time cleaning out spam, imagine what the guys running the mail servers have to go through every...damned...day.

Heres a bit of perspective, movies and music can be easily published with P2P, that requires very very very little bandwidth on the server because everyone uploads from their own connections. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer [wikipedia.org] for more information. But spam is sent almost purely via e-mail which comes from a centralized server and is not P2P plus they are sent in massive amounts, enough to use up a chunk of bandwidth, even more so when they embed images and such in there.

But spam is sent almost purely via e-mail which comes from a centralized server and is not P2P plus they are sent in massive amounts, enough to use up a chunk of bandwidth, even more so when they embed images and such in there.

That probably hasn't been done in a long time. Spam frequently originates from a botnet, not from a centralized server. However, from your perspective it does come _to_ a centralized server. To a certain degree, spam is a DDoS attack.

Even if it is all distributed via botnets, it is still all sent to mail servers, which are then sent on to your email program, either as headers, or full blown emails. So whether you want to download it or not, you will be getting a part of the download.

Compare this to a typical P2P transfer, where you download it if you want it, not merely because you went online. The only way that you would be able to liken spam to P2P would be if you open up a P2P program and it automatically downloads 15 second chunks o

True, it may be sent via botnets, but it's received by centralized servers. I work at a university that receives on average 1.1 million e-mails a day. Over 2/3 of that is spam. We have a massive infrastructure of spam filtering systems and storage networks just to handle our regular level of e-mail for our thousands of users. The additional cost and manpower to prevent spam from getting through is tremendous. Just the bandwidth alone for receiving 600,000 spams a day (approx. 10 gigabytes) is pretty hi

It's curious how bandwidth and storage space are costly when talking about something reviled like spam (which is generally just text), yet bandwidth and storage space are absolutely free (or nearly so) when talking about online music or movie publishing.

There is at least one month a year when my mail server gets DDoSed offline from the insane amount of spam coming through. It would cost me too much to get a better setup. Additionally I'd say about 40% of spam the mail server receives has image attachments e

Movie/Music "distribution" uses your bandwidth and time by your own choice. On the other hand, spam takes up your bandwidth and time whether you like it or not. The only way to avoid it is to not have e-mail, which causes you to lose a lot more than just spam.

The spam industry has imposed escalating usage costs on every mail server out there (bandwidth, storage, filtering, etc.). I'm sure someone did a guestimate study on total cost of spam that quantifies this, and while it isn't bringing down the banking system, it is something when taken in aggregate. Is stealing $1 from 1,000,000 people better than if someone steals $1,000,000 from one person? It's the same loss of economic capital (to those who should have it, at least), plus broken-window-esque inefficienc

Not only the costs, but the loss of trust. Email users (that's pretty much all of us), especially the non-tech types, have been told over and over to not respond to email. Some understand the instruction, many do not, but there are many who now think any email they don't like or want is spam.

I operate a web site for an author who sells his own books. We keep in touch with his internet customer base via email, using Constant Contact, a very good and ethical bulk email service. Inevitably, after we've sent

there are many who now think any email they don't like or want is spam.

I'm afraid I've pretty much lost track of which of the following categories email I don't like falls into: * Totally unsolicited untargeted mail
* Totally unsolicited targeted mail
* Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was explicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by ticking a "don't send me junk" box.
* Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was implicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by not ticking

In order of occurrence:1. Is in a non-latin character set (I speak/read English only)2. Has worse grammar then a 4th grader with learning disabilities3. IM 'invite' spam4. "Nigerian" scams

1 is obviously not a problem - I couldn't read it if I wanted to. 2 is fairly obvious - there are few people I communicate with that are like that, and even fewer that I would do business with. 3 - I don't chat, so this is both obvious and pointless. 4 - No, I will not help you collect

Yes, spam is damn annoying and the guys deserve imprisonment, and confiscation of every penny they earned through spam. But to compare fraudulent execs favorably to these, is a little overboard. Cheating you out of your money is lesser crime than spam?!?!

I think it's a tough call between the two: both cause enormous waste. You probably don't realize just how much email is spam because companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do a pretty damn good job of filtering it out of their webmail products. Similarly your employer probably has spam filters etc. All of that junk email costs time, money and power; and those resources could probably be more effectively used elsewhere.

These scum already take up the majority of bandwidth of the tubes.They are one reason why ISP's need to buy bigger servers and couldn't lower their prices.So, these scum directly cheat me out of my money, yeah.My time is also money.Losing a mail in the heap of spam can also cost you money.While i don't say they should be burnt or hung, i would like their fingers broken and banned from the net for a life.

I know a guy who whines all day about spam and uses completly unreasonable punishments for 'these people' as he says.He makes 100K+ getting to prevent SPAM from getting through corporate servers.

Seriously, if SPAM stopped he would literally be out of work.SO I like to remind him those scum suckers keep him employed, in a nice house, and private school for his kids.Without SPAM, he would be a 40K a year admin.

Clean him from everything he owns and assign an orange tight jump-suit, then locate him at a maximum security prison somewhere unknown and forget about him. Just make sure that he ends up in the "wrong" cell block.

I get as livid as anyone about spam, but the whole prison rape thing really bugs me. Its real and is allowed to occur by our prison system, but is not part of the sentence. Nobody, not even spammers, deserve rape. What I don't get is why it took so long to take down this known spammer.